Reading Mughal India

In the early twentieth century, Indian thinkers were developing a critique of British rule in India. However, their preoccupation with colonialism and modernity should not obscure the fact that they were equally concerned with the pre-colonial past. In Azad's writings, which covered a vast array of topics, ranging from religion and politics to art and historiography, a search to construct an understanding of a longer tradition of Islam and Muslims is discernible. His first encounter with India's Islamic past took place in 1907, when he published an introductory note on an article by one Muhammad Yusuf Khan, which had come up for publication in a Calcutta Urdu journal called Shams-i Bangāla (the Sun of Bengal). The article itself was a translation of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb's (d. 1707) views on education and pedagogy (ta‘līm aur atālīqī), recorded, as the author wrote, in Niccolao Manucci's Storia do Mogor, a modified version of which, according to the author, is also available in Francois Bernier's Travels.Footnote ¹ The editor of the journal had asked Maulana Azad to review the article. The article was brief, only six pages long, the first two of which were a commentary on Aurangzeb's text to which Azad added an introductory editorial note.Footnote ² Here he appears to be very sensitive to the ways in which the Islamic past and the Mughals—in this case Aurangzeb in particular—were portrayed in British colonial historiography as harsh tyrants.

Azad's second important piece on Mughal India was an essay on the seventeenth-century mystical wanderer, Hakim Sarmad, which was published in 1910 in a special issue Shahīd number of Nizām al-Mashā’ikh, an Urdu monthly edited by the noted twentieth-century Chishti Shaikh of Delhi, Khwaja Hasan Nizami (d. 1955). Azad portrayed Sarmad as a spokesman for ‘Truth’, in confrontation with Aurangzeb and some of his close courtiers. But while commenting on Aurangzeb's role in the execution of Sarmad, Azad made a most telling remark. He wrote:

In 1919 Azad published his famous book Tazkira wherein he projected the seventeenth- century Naqshbandi saint, Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi (d.1624), as a political figure who fought against the Mughal emperor Akbar's heresy. This is of greater significance for our purpose, for it is projected as having had a long historiographic afterlife. In the modern historiography of Mughal India, Sirhindi has occupied a high place. In various works, he is portrayed as providing the turning point in the religious politics of Mughal India, while in others he is dismissed as a conservative and reactionary figure who had little impact on the actual politics of the time.Footnote ⁴ Sirhindi's prominence in the South Asian Muslim imagination and history, however, remains almost unparalleled, comparable only to that of Shah Wali Allah of Delhi (d. 1762). In some circles, he is also considered the origin of the ideology of an independent homeland for the Muslims in the subcontinent. New editions and translations of Sirhindi's work as well as new scholarship on him continue to be steadily published.Footnote ⁵

Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi

In this historiographical stream, Azad's portrayal of Sirhindi has been particularly impactful. Shaikh Muhammad Ikram notes that Azad was the first to project him as a political figure,Footnote ⁶ a reading that Yohanan Friedmann echoed in greater detail, noting that there is nothing in the scholarship about Sirhindi's political role before Azad.Footnote ⁷ Friedmann cites here Azad's Tazkira, but while his view regarding the nature of Azad's portrayal of Sirhindi is correct, his assessment that Azad was the first to cast Sirhindi as a radical reformer, and that later such evaluations of Sirhindi were all inspired by Azad's account in Tazkira, needs reconsideration. A close reading of Tazkira demonstrates that Azad was not the first to cast Sirhindi in this light—in fact, Sirhindi himself carefully and deliberately constructed this image of himself as a renewer of the faith and an uncompromising rebel against tyranny.Footnote ⁸

Indeed, one may speculate if Azad himself may not have been familiar with this view of Sirhindi since it prevailed among his closest followers and disciples from the Mughal era onwards. Sirhindi's persona, as he constructed it, continued after his death and was even elaborated on in exaggerated terms in a hagiography, Rauzat al-Qaiyūmiya (The Garden of Qaiyūmiyat), compiled in the eighteenth century, by a member of his own family, Khwaja Kamal al-Din Muhammad Ihsan Mujaddidi Sirhindi.Footnote ⁹ In other words, the propagation of a tradition of seeing Sirhindi as the mujaddid of the second millennium, which originated with Sirhindi himself, had long roots.Footnote ¹⁰ The Rauzat al-Qaiyumiya, although similar in the extent to which it paints Sirhindi as a political rebel in the name of religion, is decidedly more hagiographic in its flavour than Azad's account. As a point of comparison and contrast with Azad's work and as an illustration of the tradition of the reception of Sirhindi, a brief description of the Rauzat may be instructive. This text, in four parts, is a tazkira of four generations of Sirhindi's family who are described as the qaiyums (one who upholds the world) of their respective times, beginning with Sirhindi himself. Indeed, the text begins with an elaborate longue durée reconstruction of Islamic history in order to contextualise Sirhindi's position. The author first discusses the significance of the concept of tajdīd, transitioning into a discourse on the role of Umar, the second Pious Caliph and the great-grandfather of Sirhindi. In doing so, he drew upon several hadiths, the most important of which is the following: ‘If Prophethood had continued after me (Muhammad), it would have been assigned to Umar (lau kān ba‘di nabīyan lakāna ‘Umar)’. According to the author, this hadith, where the Prophet had spoken about Umar, was proved to be virtually true a thousand years later about one of his descendants, that is, Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi, because whatever Sirhindi did, had already been done in earlier times by the prophets who brought a new religion. The hagiographer then discusses how one of his ancestors was sent by the Caliph of Baghdad to conquer Kabul, where he became the ruler after its conquest. In other words, he gave Sirhindi not only a theologically significant genealogy but also one that spoke of political power.Footnote ¹¹

The author of Rauzat then describes several visions concerning Sirhindi's birth. One concerned how visionaries had even seen the Ka‘ba in his birthplace in Sirhind. The author also recounted several visions from the other Sufi orders, including some notable Chishti figures such as Shaikh Salim Chishti (d. 1572) and Shaikh Abd al-Quddus Gangohi (d. 1537), heralding the birth of Sirhindi and his spiritual pre-eminence. Another vision involved the founders/progenitors of the schools of jurisprudence, Imam Abu Hanifa (d. 767) and Imam Shafi‘i (d. 820), appearing to give Sirhindi full authority to interpret their jurisprudence and even reverse their rulings.Footnote ¹² Perhaps the most significant vision that the author mentions relates to the Mughal emperor Akbar himself. After discussing Sirhindi's immediate ancestors, he describes, at imaginative length, the corruptions and decadence of Islam during Akbar's time, attributing to the emperor the grossest blasphemies in the order of those attributed to the pharaoh, or King Herod in the biblical tradition, which prefigured the coming of a great religious person. Finally, coming to the actual birth of Sirhindi, the text avers that it was accompanied by an astrological event that occurs only once in a thousand years, and which had last occurred before the birth of the Prophet. Akbar himself was visited by the following nightmare just before Sirhindi's birth: a strong wind coming from the north, from Sirhind, carried away his throne as he sat upon it; it was turned upside down, thus tumbling him from his seat. The fear of this dream rendered the king tongue-tied, and the nobles began to speculate among themselves about the illness that had rendered him silent. After a week, the king declared that he was not ill and he described his dream, explaining that he feared that not only would he lose the throne but all the corruptions he had instituted would be shattered. This vision led seamlessly into the narrative of Sirhindi's life, which was at pains to show just how he battled the corruptions and tyranny of Akbar's reign. In particular, the author recounts how, after his political emergence, Sirhindi invited the people to present themselves either in the court of Akbar (bārgāh-i Akbarī) or the court of Muhammad (bārgāh-i Muhammadī).Footnote ¹³

Azad was thus not the first to portray Sirhindi as a political figure. Further, the view, as given in Ikram's Rūd-i Kausar, that it was only Azad's reading of Sirhindi that brought this image of the saint out from the circle of his devotees and the followers of the Naqshbandi order shows a rather unfair assessment of the range of the order's influence and the role, good or bad, that the Naqshbandi Mujaddidis played in South Asian Islam.Footnote ¹⁴ We may note here, by comparison, that the South Asian Muslim memory of Sayyid Muhammad Jaunpuri (d. 1505) and his associates is not the same as that of Sirhindi, despite Azad's admiration for Jaunpuri and his circle. What is surprising is that even Shaikh Muhammad Ikram, whose assessment of Sirhindi itself is in such hyperbolic terms, also takes the same position regarding Azad's role in the promotion of Sirhindi's image in the South Asian Muslim imagination.Footnote ¹⁵

Why Sirhindi?

Whether Azad brought the image of Sirhindi as an ideal Islamic political figure with widespread acceptability or he intended to ‘set the tone for the treatment of Sirhindi in subsequent works’ is a moot point.Footnote ¹⁶ The question that concerns us here is why Azad's portrayal of Sirhindi bore such a resemblance to the earlier Mughal Indian tradition of the reception of Sirhindi. We may remember here that Azad's father, Maulana Khairuddin, was primarily a Naqshbandi and Qadiri pīr and speculate that his own personal associations with the Naqshbandi order may have influenced his views.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet, Azad's treatment of Sirhindi was in any case a more political than hagiographic reading of the figure. Given the saint's pre-eminent position in the memory of South Asian Muslims, portraying him (Sirhindi) from a purely religious point of view would have been a self-defeating enterprise for Azad. This might have been one reason for choosing such a strongly political reading as he could have hardly ignored Sirhindi in a historical work such as Tazkira. For Azad's theological positions were markedly, and radically, different from those of Sirhindi—he was consistently accommodationist, both before and after the writing of Tazkira.

A notable illustration of this was Azad's evaluation, as we saw above, of Sarmad's position. In this essay Azad also admired Dara Shukoh—in particular, the prince's high spiritual stature, his non-sectarianism, his openness to the non-Islamic and Indic traditions, and his attempt to highlight the commonality between Islam and ‘Hinduism’/the Brahminical tradition. He writes:

Given the fact that Dara Shukoh could be seen as the spiritual heir of the legacy of Sirhindi's nemesis, Akbar, Azad's position was clearly different from Sirhindi's at this very early stage. Moreover, if such were Azad's views before the writing of Tazkira, which contains his treatment of Sirhindi, his ideas regarding wahdat-i adyān, or the unity of religions, during his later career they are even more well-known as liberal and accommodationist between diverse religious traditions.Footnote ¹⁹ Did Tazkira, with its aggrandisement of Sirhindi, then represent a radical change in Azad's religious views after publishing his essay on Sarmad, a view which he then abandoned again in his later career?

Aijaz Ahmad, a noted Marxist scholar, suggests changes in the evolution of Maulana Azad's religious and political ideas. He writes that the ‘insight in maturity’ should not be ‘read back into the youth’ to have ‘the impression of a seamless growth, unproblematic and always fully enlightened and secular, from the start’.Footnote ²⁰ He adds:

Ian Henderson Douglas also has nearly, if not exactly, similar views. He writes that in Tazkira ‘Azad felt himself to be in spiritual succession of such men as Ibn Hanbal, Ibn Taimiya, Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi, Sayyid Muhammad Jaunpuri and Shah Waliullah’.Footnote ²²

Not only do such views seem unlikely, but Azad himself too would have countered them and claimed that he had held the same belief since 1912. We know that in a speech in 1921, he said that in the very first issue of Al-Hilāl, he had declared his belief that it was the religious duty (farz-i shara‘ī) of the Muslims of India in all sincerity to tie the knot of loyalty and love with the Hindus.Footnote ²³ Earlier, in 1913 and 1914, the positions he took in Al-Hilāl, we will see below, were opposed to the kind of sharī‘a, sunna, and bida‘ that Sirhindi is generally known for. There are several other scholars who think the same way as Azad projects.Footnote ²⁴ But, more importantly, the people who observed Azad closely also endorsed him as he projects his position. Abdur Razzaq Malihabadi, for instance, who lived with him for over a quarter of century, saw no change in his religious and political visions throughout his career. Even when he fought for the khilāfat, he advocated a position of Hindu-Muslim unity.Footnote ²⁵ In Azad's view the Quran divides the non-Muslims into two categories, one kuffār, and the other allies of the Muslims. The Hindus of India belonged to the second category. ‘The performance of the Indian Muslims will be the best only if they are one with the Hindus.’Footnote ²⁶ Throughout his stay in Ranchi, where he wrote his Tazkira, Azad maintained this position. He welcomed Hindus as an audience in his Friday sermons; he accepted their donations in building the madrasa and Anjuman-i Islāmiya there.Footnote ²⁷

There is a consistency in the accommodationist views Azad held throughout his career, and therefore it seems unfair to attribute his positive portrayal of Sirhindi to some mythical conservative moment in his theological evolution. A better solution may be to take seriously the fact that what attracted Azad to the figure of Sirhindi was not his theological views but rather what he represented as a political figure—that is, one who was not afraid to stand against what he perceived as tyranny in the name of principle. To take a comparable analogy, Azad's sympathetic portrayal of the Mahdavis, whom he includes in his discussion of India's Islamic past, was not because he shared their religious views but because of the steadfastness of Sayyid Muhammad Jaunpuri and his disciples, Shaikh Alai and Shaikh Abd-Allah Niyazi, in the face of royal persecution.Footnote ²⁸ Indeed, Sirhindi is only one of a cast of characters in Tazkira that formed a kind of political martyrology. Yet, this was not a random assortment of personal heroes. Azad clearly expressed the underlying principle by which he selected these figures from the past for his discussion in Tazkira.

Jihād and ‘azīmat in Azad's early writings

Azad begins his reconstruction of the Islamic past in Tazkira during the course of his account of one of his own ancestors. It is in this context that he provides a discussion of the theology of Sayyid Muhammad Jaunpuri and his disciples and, more than that, of their brave resistance against and sufferings at the hands of the rulers of the time. Azad's ancestor, Shaikh Jamal al-Din, together with his murshid Shaikh Daud Jahniwal (d. 1574–75),Footnote ²⁹ had stood firm against the tyrants of the time, despite the indifference and unjust stand of several major contemporary scholars like Makhdum al-Mulk Abd-Allah Sultanpuri.Footnote ³⁰ Shaikh Jamal al-Din and Shaikh Daud even wrote a book predicting that the fruit of the injustices of these rulers would be the end of their reign.Footnote ³¹ After discussing the experiences of his ancestor, as well as those of Sayyid Muhammad Jaunpuri and the Mahdavis in fighting against the rulers of the day, Azad defines their action as the best of jihād, invoking the famous hadith: ‘the best of jihād is the word of truth in the face of the tyrannical ruler’ (Afzal al-jihād-i kalima-tu Haqqin ‘inda sultānin jā’ir). Azad is very particular in citing the authorities for this hadith, namely, Tirmizi, Abu Daud, and Ibn Maja (rawāhu al-Tirmizī, wa Abū Dā’ud wa Ibn Māja).Footnote ³² He then elaborates on the conditions of faith (imān) required to be capable of such jihād in an extensive theological excursus revolving around the Quranic verse ‘innā zālika la min ‘azm il-umūr’ (Indeed, all that is of the matters [requiring] determination. Quran: 31/16). Citing several Quranic verses and hadiths, Azad demonstrates that there are three stages of faith, the highest of which he characterised as ‘azīmat or determination.Footnote ³³ Those who attain this stage were, in Azad's estimation, far ahead of everyone else, including those who merely spent their days devoted to routine scholarly religious activities in madrasas or sublime spiritual practices in mystic retreats:

Azad shows how the men of ‘azīmat contrasted with the more routinely pious men who undoubtedly were engaged in service of the faith (through da‘wat) but were not capable of the higher office of ‘azīmat-i da‘wat, that is, the determined commitment to the practice and propagation of the faith. They thus remained at the stage of rukhsat (permission, relaxation).Footnote ³⁴ ‘This is the very difference between ‘azīmat and rukhsat [the secret of],’ Azad writes, ‘which a Sufi (master of soul/heart, sāhib-i dil) having abandoned the retreat of a khānqāh had divulged to the Shaikh of Shiraz: Guft an galīm-i khwīsh badar mī burad ze mauj / Win sa‘y mī kunad ki bar ārad gharīq ra (That one claims that his prayer mat will be a raft upon the waves / While this one dives down to rescue the drowning).’

The men of ‘azīmat were also always ready for action. Significantly, Azad expressed all their qualities in a series of Quranic phrases such as ‘as sabiqun’, ‘asbaqun bil khairat’, ‘munfiqun al-awwalun’, ‘mujahiduna bil ‘amali wal jawarih’.Footnote ³⁵ Moreover, the light of the knowledge and the actions of such people, Azad writes, were derived directly from the lamp of the Prophet (mishkat-i nubuwwat se makhuz). It is only they who actually inherit and represent the tradition of the Prophet.Footnote ³⁶

Azad sought to demonstrate the veracity of this theological discourse through an appeal to Islamic history. He located the point of origin of this genealogy of those blessed with the capacity for the office of ‘azīmat-i da‘wat in the figure of Imam Husain. What made this such a natural starting point was the fact of the martyrdom of Husain. While in Tazkira, Azad's treatment of Husain is relatively limited, taken together, his various writings on the martyrdom of the imam in opposition to the tyranny of Yazid seem so effusive as to almost place in doubt their orthodoxy from the Sunni Muslim standpoint. In one essay, he goes so far as to reiterate the Sufi tradition regarding the claim that the martyrdom of Husain represented the completion of Prophethood. Some of the legends that he repeats in his essays on Husain were, in fact, proscribed by some prominent Sunni scholars, including by another of Azad's own martyr-heroes, Ibn-i Taimiya, who appears in Tazkira in such laudatory terms. Here Azad considered some theological aspects of the purist Ibn Taimiya because in India, he notes, the ‘ulamā’ of his time knew little about him. Azad's principal aim was to highlight his significance as a fighter against injustice in the Islamic tradition.Footnote ³⁷ Azad is at pains to show that his hero rose above a group of accomplished contemporaries, that he stood alone in his ability to both revive and renew the faith and in taking responsibility for the commitment to its propagation. In other words, he fitted the definition of one who had attained the highest stage of the faith, ‘azīmat. As with Sirhindi, Azad judges Ibn-i Taimiya's accomplishments to behove prophets.Footnote ³⁸ An important element of Azad's construction of Ibn-i Taimiya involves a long excursus on extraordinary courage in the face of tyranny and the willingness to undergo imprisonment and even death in defence of his principles.Footnote ³⁹

All these elements are also present in Azad's portrayal of another hero of the Islamic past, Imam Ahmad ibn Hambal, who went against no less than four consecutive Abbasid rulers, a fact that Azad specially highlights. Again, the notion of tajdīd and ‘azimat-i da‘wat are key to the construction of Azad's hero. After describing Ibn-i Hambal's refusal to accept the tyrant's commands, even in the face of a threat of mortal punishment, without proof from the Quran, Azad writes, in yet another echo of his words on Sirhindi, ‘if this lamp of tajdīd and the candle of the ‘azīmat-i da‘wat were not derived from the lamp of Prophethood (mishkāt-i nubuwwat), then what else was it?’Footnote ⁴⁰

What, then, Azad sought in the figure of Sirhindi in his selective construction of the Islamic past was a homegrown example of a figure with the qualities of ‘azīmat. Thus, the repeated echoes of the language and rhetorical strategies Azad used to describe these other heroes also resounded in his portrayal of Sirhindi. As for Azad's view of Sirhindi's thoughts on Islam, we may note that he also sounds admiring of Akbar's liberal politics. He published Shibli Numani's poem in praise of Akbar in Al-Hilāl in November 1913, approvingly, without any editorial comment.Footnote ⁴¹

‘Azīmat, jihād, and the non-Muslims

Again, while Tazkira constructed a most particular reading of Islamic history by building a tradition of principled men capable of standing against tyranny, elsewhere it exceeded the bounds of Islamic history and even bracketed Ahmad ibn Hanbal with Galileo.Footnote ⁴² Indeed, his willingness to search for political martyrs and the people of ‘azīmat was not confined either to the Islamic past or to the Muslim community. Consider in this context his essay published in Al-Hilāl in March 1914 about a Hindu girl, Snehalata Mukhopadhyay, who committed suicide because her parents were unable to fulfil the prevailing customary demand for a dowry and thus find her an educated match from a good family. Besides the fact that Azad called her shahīd-i rasm (a martyr to custom) and uses the term ‘ūlu al-‘azm’ (a person who possesses ‘azīmat) to describe her, he begins his essay in the following telling manner:

Azad projects Snehalata's death as a true illustration of the Quranic verse, inna- Allāh fāliq al habb wa an nawā (It is Allah who causeth the seed grain and the date stone to split and sprout. Quran: 6/95). He also identifies the martyred Snehalata as an angelic soul (rūh-i malakūtī).Footnote ⁴³

It is interesting to note here that the Bengali newspapers describing Snehalata's death used the word ‘balidāna’, the term for Hindu religious sacrifice, and thus showed a nationalist secularisation of the term in the journalistic practice of the period.Footnote ⁴⁴ Azad, in transposing this characterisation into Islamic martyrdom (shahādat) and sacrifice, displayed not only an understanding of the Hindu connotations of the term but also a keen desire to think together across communal divides. He thus elevated Snehalata's death from an event that was solely relevant to the Hindu community to one that was of symbolic importance to all Indians. Moreover, in subsuming this into the notion of jihād, he specifically brought this event into the fold of Islamic history and ideology. In other words, for Azad, a non-Muslim could be considered a martyr in the Quranic sense, without raising the thorny question of kufr and Islam and conversion, a position that foreshadowed his later radical theology.

Snehalata was not the first Hindu Azad deemed a martyr in the cause of jihād. Earlier, in November 1913, he had reported passionately on the ordeal of Indians in South Africa and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's fight for them, in a piece entitled ‘al-naba’ al-alīm (the sad news)’, the same heading he used to describe the predicament of Muslims in Tripoli. He appealed to his Muslim readers to mobilise in support of their brethren in South Africa in the same way they did in protest against the demolition of the Kanpur Mosque. He reported that Gandhi—for his beloved country and mourning the fate of the Indians in South Africa—had decided to wear the clothing of ordinary workers and to eat only once a day. Azad not only described Gandhi's struggle as jihād in the path of Allah (fī sabīl Allah) but used the conventional Quranic du‘āiya (prayer) phrases, ‘sabbat Allāh aqdāmahu wa ‘azzama ujūrahu wa razaqanā min amsālihi (May God make his steps firm, may he get great rewards, may God bless us with [many] like him)’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Indeed, Azad tries to convince his Muslim readers that Gandhi's fight was as much theirs, as faithful Muslims, as anyone else's:

Azad's brilliant characterisation of Gandhi's early experiments with non-violent protest jihād hinted at greater ambitions. Taken together, his essays and Tazkira suggest perhaps that Azad was attempting to lay the foundation for a new sort of Muslim theological practice in the context of South Asia, one which was attentive to present and local realities as much as to Islamic thought and tradition.

The ‘ulamā and the problems of the Muslims of the time

Azad's construction of the past is only one part of his discourse in Tazkira. Although it was ostensibly meant to be a memoir, throughout Tazkira, Azad was more concerned with the present and he invoked the past mainly as a means to strengthen the appeal of his message. Part of this message was directed quite pointedly at his brethren religious leaders. His own disappointment with the majority of this community was palpable. For instance, in connection with a section in Tazkira describing the books customarily used in the madrasas of medieval India, particularly in Mughal India, Azad mentions a text entitled Usūl-i Bazdawī, a book on the principles of jurisprudence. Azad notes that this text was considered fundamental and many Indian scholars in the past, including his ancestor Shaikh Jamal al-Din, had written commentaries upon it. Azad, however, took exception to the status of the work, implying that it was no longer enough for contemporary purposes.Footnote ⁴⁹ Yet, it was not merely a faulty or incomplete grasp of past Islamic knowledge that beset the ‘ulamā of the day. It was rather a lack of understanding of the fundamental issues at stake in religious life. Azad explained, for instance, the opposition of the sixteenth-century ‘ulamā to Sayyid Muhammad Jaunpuri as driven by the trivialities and frivolities of religious life (juz'iyāt, furū‘iyāt), which, he emphasised, unfortunately dominated the religious discourses of the ‘ulamā of his own time.Footnote ⁵⁰ Such were the ‘ulamā and their false and misguided beliefs. The sad result was that their quarrels over petty matters, which they projected as ‘dīn’, sapped the strength of their community:

For as long as Islam's foundations lay in five fundamental pillars, Azad writes, there were no internal fights in the community. Dissension and disunity only began to take root in Islam because of the influence of non-Arabs (‘ajam) on Islam and the importing of Greco-Hellenic thought into the tradition. At the same time, the evolution of jurisprudence and dogmatics (al-kalām) were mixed up with the banes of the cultures of the non-Arabs and the Greeks:

Thus, Azad not only criticised a certain rationalist strand in the evolution of Islamic philosophy but, more importantly, although the ostensible thrust of his argument was historical, his primary concern remained rooted in the present as an attempt to diagnose and cure the religious ills of his day. In response to a complaint by the ‘ulamā about the heretical tendencies of English-educated people who displayed little interest in Islamic tradition, Azad pointed out that their divergence from the truth of the Quran in favour of the new-fangled sciences of Europe was not any different from the divergence of the ‘ulamā who were so wedded to Greco-Hellenic learning. In fact, in Azad's opinion, the latter were even more culpable because they still adhered to a long-dead philosophical tradition, whereas they (the English educated) were attempting to partake of the current system of European thought.

In this context, Azad also pointed out that projects like those suggested by Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan were ultimately self-defeating, because they would not bring the community closer to the Quran and its truths. In Azad's understanding, in ancient times, when the Ash‘arites and Mu‘tazilites attempted to protect Islam from the philosophical criticisms of outsiders, they in fact made the tradition more vulnerable by incorporating these philosophies. In the same way, the contemporaneous call to found a new ‘ilm-i kalām was wrong-headed, as such an enterprise would not ultimately protect the faith. ‘Having said this, then it should be known that I am not one of those who have raised slogans to proclaim that the old rationalist traditions are completely useless and that the reform of the madrasa syllabi means to drown all these books in the sea (gharq-i mai-i nāb). What I say is that in those works the good has been mixed with the false.’Footnote ⁵⁴

Azad's early political career

Tazkira represents a critical moment in both the evolution of Maulana Azad's anticolonial struggle as well as his struggle for reform of the Muslims and, more than that, their so-called religious guides and divines. He announced forcefully his fight against imperialism in 1912 with the launching of Al-Hilāl. Although Azad was committed to a united fight against the colonial government from the very beginning, in Al-Hilāl his primary objective was to stir the Muslim population to join this struggle, emphasising repeatedly that it was their Quranic obligation to throw themselves into this fight. Moreover, it was incumbent upon them, Azad believed, to distinguish themselves as an integral constituent of this fight. He launched the organisation Hizb Allāh to reiterate and establish this Quranic obligation for Muslims and also to build a core group of leaders of the community. Around the same time, he also sought to redefine and renovate the notion of religious learning, which found expression in the establishment of Dār al-Irshād. He also indicated that Maulana Mahmud Hasan of Deoband would be the organisation's leader.Footnote ⁵⁵ To a certain, although by no means sufficient, extent, the Muslim community did respond to Azad's call. At around the same time, however, Mahmud Hasan left for Hajj, from where the British, suspecting him of working against the empire, took him to Malta as a prisoner.Footnote ⁵⁶

Moreover, within a few months, we know, Al-Hilāl was banned and Azad's subsequent publication, Al-Balāgh, was also quickly shut down. Azad himself was then summarily exiled from Calcutta.Footnote ⁵⁷ This forced exile happened at a moment when Azad was at the height of his activities to reform the Muslims and to mobilise them for the anticolonial struggle, and when these activities were eliciting a response, however lukewarm. But while the dislocation to Ranchi was frustrating, his mission to encourage and promote the cosmopolitan milieu continued unabated. In his sermons and activities inside the mosque he welcomed local Hindus as well. Even in such foundational endeavours as the collection of donations for a madrasa and Anjuman-i Islāmiya, Hindu luminaries such as Kalipada Ghosh, Radha Gobindo Choudhury, Amrendranath Banerjee, Thakur Das, Bipin Chandra Pal, and others were invited. Azad did not abandon the principle of conviviality across communities that was a hallmark of his earlier and later career. It may be worth remembering here that at much the same time (in June 1919) Azad published an article in which he advocated and supported the entry of Hindus into mosques.Footnote ⁵⁸

Tazkira, written and published during Azad's stay in Ranchi, therefore, must be read as part and parcel of these larger efforts; even if the choice of heroes in this work might give an impression (rather a wrong one) of an exclusionary bent of mind and an affirmation of ‘the supremacy of orthodoxy’.Footnote ⁵⁹ We should, however, also consider the circumstances in which Tazkira was written, and Azad's response to those constraints. Indeed, the fact that Tazkira had been composed during his internment in Ranchi perhaps also contributed to the focus in Azad's historical enquiries on figures in the Islamic past who had suffered at the hands of official persecutors. Sayyid Sulaiman Nadvi, who visited Azad during his internment in Ranchi, noted that Azad had developed a new-found interest in the writings of Ibn Taymiya and Ibn Qayyim.Footnote ⁶⁰ It appears that this interest derived in no small measure from the commonality Azad felt between his own condition and that of his predecessors. Indeed, all his heroes during this period, as evidenced by both Tazkira and the correspondence of his friends, were figures who had been imprisoned for the vocal expression of their views by tyrannical rulers.

Azad's imprisonment also prevented him from polishing Tazkira into a more finished form, as he had hoped. The published work was thus the (unrevised) result of the effort of his friend, Mirza Fazluddin Ahmad, who had encouraged Azad to write his autobiography. Azad acquiesced, as he writes to Maulana Abdul Majid Daryabadi, somewhat unhappily.Footnote ⁶¹ And the terms that he used to describe his decision to allow the publication of this incomplete version are worth noting:

Clearly, Azad's confinement was having a frustrating effect on his own sense of determination, and he sometimes channelled this demoralisation into verse. At one point he describes Tazkira as a ‘book of frustrated melancholy’ (gham-nāma-i hasrat), adding, a few lines later, the following couplet:

Azad sensed, too, that his confinement was not only thwarting his ability to engage in regular activities, but was also transforming his relationship to time itself, haunting him with a sense of lost time and missed opportunities. One of the most moving couplets in Tazkira, in fact, plays precisely on this theme, in which moments of joy can seem so fleeting, whereas moments of grief and frustration can seem to last forever:

The sense on Maulana Azad's part that the project remained unfinished is a theme that runs throughout Tazkira. Thus, as a crucial element of his perspective, we would be remiss if we were to forget it ourselves.

Summing up

From 1912 onwards, Azad had tried to show that justifiable struggle for truth and against tyranny was part of Islamic history and tradition. Through Tazkira, Azad sought to convince his Muslim brothers that—even if they themselves were not able to abide by the principles of ‘azīmat—they should recognise it in others and support them. In this case, the implication was that Azad and his brothers-in-arms in the anticolonial struggle, such as Gandhi or even Snehalata, bore the standard of ‘azīmat. Tazkira was thus an attempt to rouse his Muslim readers to fight against the colonial enemy, whereas later, in his Quranic commentary, he clearly formulates the theological foundations for his vision of the new nation. This does not mean that there is some fundamental change in his religious thinking, particularly regarding inter-communal harmony, from Tazkira to the Quranic commentary; rather, the two texts, insofar as they may appear to diverge, are actually complementary parts of Azad's thought and political evolution, from anticolonial freedom fighter to the architect of a new nation.

Of course, this laser-sharp focus on the immediate present of Azad's historical writings was somewhat problematic. His selection and interpretations of figures from India's Islamic past in Tazkira were undoubtedly suited to the purpose of rousing the spirit of self-sacrifice and brave struggle against tyranny during the anticolonial movement. Yet, this text proved to be self-defeating in the post-colonial nation-building moment when those same historical figures symbolised the struggle for Islamic orthodoxy and purity against Azad's vision of national integration and communal accord. Still, it is important to emphasise that these seeming contradictions in his oeuvre are the result of the different national problems he tackled during his long career as a religious and political thinker, not an index of some fundamental change in his attitudes or belief.

Azad saw himself far ahead of his own time in his command of Islamic learning and history. He was not satisfied with his image as merely a superb rhetorician, a master of the magic of words [alfāz kā tilism]; rather saw himself as one who understood every stage of the evolution of Islamic sciences, and not just the Quran and its commentarial tradition, better than his contemporaries. In this context, one may also consider his intention to bring out two monthly Arabic journals, al-Basā’ir and al-Bayān, as attested by repeated announcements in Al-Hilāl. The linguistic choice of these proposed journals implies that he wished to reach the ‘ulamā through these organs and convince them of his own mastery as an Islamic scholar. It was for the same audience that he often wrote the first pages, fātihat al-Kitāb, of Al-Hilāl in Arabic. The change in Tazkira from the writings that preceded it was thus more in the order of a gradual evolution rather than any kind of radical break. Azad's primary concern, as is evident especially in a seemingly historical work such as Tazkira, was with his contemporary political present and the struggles of his day. Tazkira reflected the pressures of the early anticolonial movement, while his later writings reflected those of a promising independent and diverse nation. Thus, what appear as contradictions in Azad are not fundamental breaks or ruptures in his political or religious commitments, but only varying emphases in his response to varying political situations.